BIO

Richard STREITMATTER-TRAN (b. 1972, Bien Hoa, Vietnam) is an artist living and working in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He received his degree in the Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM) at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.

He was an arts correspondent for the Madrid-based magazine Art.Es and and Ho Chi Minh City editor for Contemporary and has published in several books, catalogs and journals.

In 2005 he received the Martell Contemporary Asian Art Research Grant from the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong for his year-long research project, Mediating the Mekong. He was a Teaching Assistant at Harvard University (2000-2004), conducted media arts research at the MIT Media Lab (2000) and a visiting lecturer at the Ho Chi Minh Fine Arts University in 2003-4. He was an advisor to the Para/Site Curatorial Programme in Hong Kong and the San Art Artist Residency program in Ho Chi Minh City. He received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Massachusetts College of Art in 2012. From 2006 - 2015 he was Senior Lecturer at RMIT International University Vietnam.

Upon relocating to Vietnam in 2003, he formed ProjectOne, a Ho Chi Minh City-based performance art collective now defunct. Two years later he became a founding member of Mogas Station (2005-2007), a group of international creators (artists and architects) based in Ho Chi Minh City.

In 2010, he established DIA/PROJECTS, a contemporary art experiment and studio space in Ho Chi Minh City. Work- ing with collaborator Le Tuong Vi under the persona, VILE/ RATS, they form projects emerging from artistic research and speculative investigations into the fault lines of science, philosophy and art. Other projects have included collaborations with CIANT (Prague), The Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong), The Japan Foundation and The Japan Society. Since its inception, dia/projects has hosted five researchers in residence from Bangkok, Manila, Montreal, Seoul and Tokyo. From 2015-2017, with Tran Thanh Ha, Dia Projects launched a new exhibition space in Ho Chi Minh City.

As co-curator he conceived The Mekong exhibition with Russell Storer of the Queensland Art Gallery for the 6th Asia Pacific Triennale (APT6) in 2009 and continues developing curatorial concepts for Dia Projects. He was a finalist in the 2016 Sovereign Art Prize exhibited at Christie's in Hong Kong and was artist in residency at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Singapore in 2017 and Bangkok University Gallery in 2018. He will be a participating artist in the Thailand Biennale in late 2018.

While his practice historically has included performance and new media, his current focus involves the investigation of materials and largely through figurative sculpture, painting, installation and drawing. His work can be found in numerous publications worldwide and is in private and public collections including the Singapore Art Museum, The Documenta Archives, RMIT University Vietnam Art Collection, IILM Art Collection and Post-Vidai Collection.